Movement on museum walls A retrospective on choreographer Trisha Brown captures the ephemeral nature of dance. By Iris Fanger for The Christian Science Monitor

ANDOVER, MASS. – A concern of the performing artist - probably since the first person stood up before the clan to re-create a victory in the hunt - is how to preserve the action after the audience has gone. Unlike paintings, sculptures, photographs, and films, which can be revisited, a movement on stage lives only in memory once the theater lights come down. "The end product of my work is on a stage which is a disappearing act all its own," says Trisha Brown, the innovative performer and choreographer who has been making dances since 1961.

But a new museum exhibit, "Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue 1961-2001," aims to pin down the ephemeral art of the dance. Currently on display at the Addison Gallery of Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass, the exhibit will also stop in Houston, New York, and Seattle through mid-2004.

NEW YORK - Some sat in cross-legged clusters, while others stretched on their toes or rushed from one end of the floor to another — and this was just the audience, straining to catch a glimpse of the dancers.

Trisha Brown returned to her roots Thursday night with "Live on Broadway," a festive, informal evening of performances scattered throughout Soho's New Museum of Contemporary Art.

PARIS The dance lasts a mere 20 minutes, almost a parenthesis in a full evening of modern ballet at the Palais Garnier. <a href=http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/28/features/Pballet.html target=_blank>more</a>

Brown is endlessly and ingeniously inventive. In one passage, a woman assumes a runner's pose, her right leg extended to the rear. A man takes her right heel into his solar plexus and completes the arc of her stride by easing to the floor on his back and sliding ahead of her. Later, they repeat this passage, but a second man slips through every opening the couple leave between their bodies.

A Dance and Its Digitized Echoes by MATTHEW MIRAPAUL for the New York Times

In an innovative fusion of modern dance and high technology, Ms. Brown is collaborating with a computer on "how long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume ...," a 30-minute work for seven dancers and animated graphics.

The Evolution of Intelligent Design by JOHN ROCKWELL for the New York Times

The program note to one of the dances, "Present Tense" (2003), suggests that it "combines Trisha Brown's abstract aesthetic with her newfound interest in emotional narrative."

Well, maybe. Except that in her own notes to another piece, Ms. Brown observes that "as in all abstract work, one can read narratives if one chooses." For me any "emotional narrative" in "Present Tense" represented more of a reading-in than an inherent quality.

Celebrating her company’s 35th anniversary and adhering to her ongoing impulse to “make it new,” Trisha Brown devoted the second of the two programs she presented in Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series to recent work. The brand new piece that copped all the advance notice was how long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume . . . , an experiment with motion capture technology that had its premiere at Arizona State University where it was developed. (Brown co-opted the title for her piece from an overheard remark made by a techie on the project. Her maverick imagination found a wry poetry in it.)

Despite the movement's New York metropolitanism, Brown's appeal is the child-of-nature secretiveness and independence that may come from her rural upbringing, but at any rate seem to me to account for the elusive attractiveness of dances that can look so simple.

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